I am not going to share my own personal opinion on whether Sabrina Carpenter’s new album cover is a good or bad thing for mankind. You can decide that for yourself. I will give you a quick overview of the controversy in case you have been binge-watching The Bear for the past week and somehow missed all the ruckus the singer has caused, but then I will move on to a broader point.
So, to recap … Carpenter, who has been releasing music for the past decade, skyrocketed to the top of the pop music universe with 2024’s insanely catchy Short n’ Sweet album. As you might expect, she became a ubiquitous presence at major festivals and major events.
And she has drawn some criticism, often from older men in the recording industry, for the overt sexuality she evinces during her performances. Google Pete Waterman for more on that.
Why are people arguing over a Sabrina Carpenter album cover?
Of course, this is nothing new in the music biz. The Red Hot Chili Peppers may have offended some bluebloods when they performed wearing strategically placed socks, but they mostly drew snickers. Let Madonna, or Britney, or … (fill in the blank) wear a G-string, and the world is coming to an end.
Still, Carpenter’s latest controversy did seem to cross a line, even for some of her defenders.
Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter’s highly anticipated follow-up to Short n’ Sweet, doesn’t drop until the end of August, but it is already grabbing a lion’s share of the media coverage in the pop music world. It is not because of the first single, “Manchild.” That song is pretty good, but I don’t know anyone who is talking about it.
They are too busy talking about the album cover.
The photo, which has been released, shows the singer in a short black dress on her knees at the feet of a headless man in a black suit. He holds a fistful of her long blond hair, and she is holding one hand against his thigh. In protest? In a caress? We don’t really know. We see what we want.
And one more thing. Though the tableau is set in profile, Carpenter has her head turned toward the camera, looking us right in the eye. If you are a Swedish film fan, you might recall Harriet Andersson offering the camera a similar stare in Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 film Summer With Monica. More on that later.
The pose is clearly submissive and sexualized. But your interpretation of its meaning… that’s a different question. Is it empowering? Humiliating? A commentary on an artist’s position in the recording industry? Or something altogether different? Again, I’m not weighing in with my own opinion.
I do want to briefly discuss the way in which album covers have functioned, particularly in terms of presenting female artists, from the early days of rock & roll. Because I do think there is a pretty good takeaway from that, regardless of whether you love or hate the cover of Man’s Best Friend.
Let’s set the stage in the pre-rock era. Julie London, a sultry blonde singer and actress in the 1950s and ‘60s, released 29 pop albums before turning her career toward acting in the 1970s. Her late-‘50s albums were very successful. As rock and roll gained audience share, her style of recording began to feel old, and her success diminished.
One of the most recognizable elements in any early Julie London album was the cover. Her debut, Julie is Her Name, featured a headshot of an unsmiling woman wearing the faintest suggestion of a dress that did little to cover her decolletage. We have to assume that it is a dress because the photo cuts off just as the dress appears.
Her next album again prominently displayed her low-cut top, and the one after that, Calendar Girl, had six different images of the singer, in various revealing outfits. This peaked in 1958 with her famous album cover for Julie, reclining back in a chair, one leg bent, the other extended up, both uncovered up to her waist.
It’s a stunning photo. Whether you consider it in good taste or not – I’ll leave that to you.
But that was the standard – if somewhat exaggerated – image of female singers that the industry was selling. Their looks were a point of emphasis. If the singer was beautiful, as London was, that sexualization was hyped even more.
This kind of thing never went away, but by the mid-‘60s, when the women’s movement began to gather serious momentum, you began seeing a different type of album cover. The best example I know of came in 1964, when Dusty Springfield released her debut album, A Girl Called Dusty.
The cover was a medium shot of the 25-year-old Springfield dressed in a denim shirt and dark blue jeans. She is smiling at the camera, with her head leaning right, her hand running through her short blond hair. It’s a great photo. The colors pop.
But it is about as far from the glamor of Julie London as you can get. This is designed to be casual. Springfield is obviously attractive, but the photo does not play up the more traditional aspects of her sexuality.
This trend, if that’s what it was, continued for the better part of a decade, perhaps culminating in 1975, with Robert Maplethorpe’s famous photo of his friend Patti Smith on the cover of her album Horses. Smith wears what appears to be a man’s suit and suspenders. White shirt, black pants, and a black coat slung casually over her shoulder. Her expression is neutral.
Whatever sex appeal may be there, it is in its most androgynous form.
Now, at the same time singers like Springfield and Smith were rejecting images of traditional feminine glamour, there was still plenty of hyper-sexualized femininity splashed across covers. Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music were all the rage amongst teenage boys in large part due to the increasingly undressed female models who graced their album covers.
That hit its famous peak in 1974 with Country Life. The cover featured two mostly-undressed women. You didn’t have to look very hard to see the pubic hair. (This was two years after the notorious Mom’s Apple Pie cover, which had to be altered due to concerns over its sneaky inclusion of female genitalia.)
By the end of the decade, American bands like the Cars had caught on. Their 1979 album Candy-O was created by Alberto Vargas, famous for his cheesecake depictions of pin-up-style women in the 1950s.
The difference between Roxy and the Cars and the albums of Julie London, Dusty Springfield, and Patti Smith was obvious. There were no women in Roxy Music. The near-naked figures that graced their covers were models, not the artist in question.
However, in 1975, the same year that Patti Smith wore a man’s suit on Horses, Carly Simon was giving the world a taste of what Sabrina Carpenter is doing today. On 1975’s Playing Possum, Simon posed in lingerie and, like Carpenter, on her knees. A few years later, on Boys in the Trees, she was again wearing lingerie, pulling a sheer stocking up her calf.
Simon caught some flak from feminists. She simply maintained that she was posing how she wanted, which to her was the very definition of feminism.
Album covers, as a cultural force, lost some of their gravitas in the ensuing decades. Albums would fade from the scene. There was still art that accompanied new music releases, but it didn’t seem quite as important. And the boundaries that defined the sexualization of the female form went largely unchallenged despite the appearance of Madonna and all the women who succeeded her.
If anything, the new boundaries of the album art debate centered on men. Sexualized images of Bobby Brown or D’Angelo garnered greater attention in the 1990s and early 2000s than images of women. And with men, the boundary-defining subject matter extended to violence as well.
1991’s We Can’t Be Stopped by the Geto Boys staked a bold claim on what could be depicted when selling an album to a modern audience.
The fact is, since the days of Carly Simon, overtly sexualized depictions of women on album covers have really not been a topic of discussion. Despite the presence of plenty of women who comfortably display their sexuality through traditional and social media, we simply don’t talk about it very much. Perhaps it has become commonplace.
Maybe the 1984 comedy This is Spinal Tap put a nail in the coffin with its satirical Smell the Glove album cover – the most famous fictional album cover that ever existed (or didn’t.)
Until Sabrina Carpenter, that is. Her latest cover seems to be a conscious reference to that Spinal Tap cover, with a woman on her knees being controlled by a man.
There are plenty of cynics who will argue that Carpenter’s new cover is nothing more than a publicity stunt. A highly successful one at that. Here we are talking about it, and the album isn’t due out for two more months. It is attracting eyeballs.
But I think there is something else going on here, whether Carpenter intended it or not.
It is all too easy for pop music to descend to the lowest common denominator. To filter itself through focus groups and the techno-wizardry of the latest producer-du-jour to become homogenous, huge, and very boring. Sabrina Carpenter is not boring.
I don’t know if the cover of Man’s Best Friend is setting back women’s rights or actually advancing them. I do know that Carpenter – just like that Harriet Andersson character in Summer With Monica – isn’t apologizing. I admire that.
And I appreciate the fact that we are even talking about issues in pop music beyond Taylor and Travis, or just how out of touch Katy Perry is. Pop music can be controversial. It can raise questions about important issues. And I’m pretty sure Sabrina Carpenter knows that.
So again, you can decide for yourself whether the specific image she chose to promote is good or bad. I just appreciate that she had the agency and audacity to do it at all.